[was: comp.lang.c.moderated]Re: How C is better then C++

[Stefan Ram]

I was wondering, what are some reasons why C is superior to C++?

C is smaller, which means, it is more easy to learn and to
handle.

»C++ is already too large and complicated for our taste«

from a Usenet post posted by Bjarne Stroustrup

»C++ is too complicated. At the moment, it's impossible
for me to write portable code that I believe would work
on lots of different systems«

Donald E. Knuth

»Today's C++ programs will be tomorrow's unmaintainable
legacy code.«

Ian Joyner

»the largest cross platform compatible subset of C++ is C«

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=8826

»C++ has always been a zombie, its only drive is the C
ghost inside it «

Pascal J. Bourguignon

<[email protected]>

»I think C++ was pushed well beyond its complexity threshold«

Joshua Bloch

http://gigamonkeys.com/blog/2009/10/16/coders-c++.html

»C++ is an unbelievably huge language«

http://blogs.msdn.com/jaredpar/archive/2009/04/21/questions-not-to-hinge-a-c-interview-on.aspx

»it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive«

Ken Thompson

http://gigamonkeys.com/blog/2009/10/16/coders-c++.html

While many students learn some basic parts of C++, only few
people should have read and understood »Modern C++ design«
by Andrei Alexandrescu.

»there are a lot of people programming it. But what you
do is you force people to subset it.«

Jamie Zawinski

http://gigamonkeys.com/blog/2009/10/16/coders-c++.html

»C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by
the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it,
to the point where it's much much easier to generate
total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the
choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++
programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason
to use C.

In other words: the choice of C is the only sane
choice.«

Linus Torvalds

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57918

So, the Boost library and modern C++ design is not well
spread knowledge. Many C++ programmers might not be able to
understand more elaborate template definitions from Boost or
Alexandrescu.

For example, ask any C++ programmer to name the rules of
»exception-safe programming in C++«, and you'll be glad to
find some who knows what you are taking about, yet this is
absolutely necessary for correct and secure C++ programs.

To read a C++ program, one has to learn all the features of
C++ that might appear in such a program. One can not rely
on the subset one might have learned.

C++ is full of exceptions and special rules. For example, an
initialization "int const v = 7;" is allowed within a class
specifier, while "double const v = 7.0;" is not. In
"std::vector<std::vector<int>> v;" the ">>" is parsed as the
operator ">>". "T t(u);" defines a variable t with type "T"
and initial value "u", while "T t();" declares a function "t".
Now guess, whether "std::vector<int> v(
std::istream_iterator<char>( cin ),
std::istream_iterator<char>() );" defines and initializes an
object "v" or declares a function "v". The type "vector<bool>" is
neither a container nor does it contain bool-objects, while
other "vector<...>"-classes are containers containing the
"..."-objects.

»the bug classes C++ introduces are way scarier than the
ones it takes off the table«

http://www.matasano.com/log/914/c-a-cautionary-tale-or-1-hour-of-your-black-hat-trip-is-spoken-for/

»C++ is a huge regression compared to C«

Felix von Leitner

http://events.ccc.de/camp/2007/Fahrplan/events/1951.en.html

C also is more stable than C++.

»I would try out the language as it was being developed
and make comments on it. It was part of the work
atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then
the next day it wouldn't work because the language
changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of
time. At some point I said, no, no more.«

Ken Thompson

And this still happens today: Just some weeks ago »concepts«
were removed from the next C++ standards, while already a
lot of people assumed that C++ will have concepts, wrote
blog posts explaining concepts and so on.

C is more widespread thant C++, at least according too:

2 C 16 % and raising
4 C++ 9 % and falling

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

»C++ has become a niche language, but I talk to many C++
programmers who live in total denial about that fact.«

http://weblogs.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2008/01/dinosaurs_can_t_1.html

»C++ is becoming a freak language that's parading its
disfigurements in front of mildly disgusted but
curiously fascinated audience.«

http://www.relisoft.com/tools/CppCritic.html

»If you port your Firefox add-on to IE, you may have to
use C++. And Allen admitted that this is a bit 1998.
"The first thing people say is 'That's horrible. No one
programs in C++ anymore,'" he said.«

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/11/firefox_to_ie_port/

(Now you see, why I use "»«" quotation marks: They do not
interfere that much with the »"« and »'« quotation marks
already used in quotations or in source code.)

»an interesting difference between "Effective Java" and
"Effective C++" is that my reaction to the latter was to
come up with a set of SOPs that mainly boil down to
"don't use C++ feature x".«

Bjorn Borud

<[email protected]>

»C++ is generally regarded as the most technically
deficient of the popular OOPLs.«

H. S. Lahman

<bv6je.8995$_f7.1506@trndny01>

»There are only two things wrong with C++, The initial
concept and the implementation.«

Bertrand Meyer

»C++ is a vast playground, and makes you feel smart
when you know all of it, so you're always tempted to use
all of it. But that's really, really hard to do well,
because it's such a crap language to begin with. In the
end, you just make a mess, even if you're good.«

http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel

»It was decisions like not using C++ and not using
threads that made us ship the product on time.«

Jamie Zawinski

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/09/23.html

»C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by
the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it (...)

I've come to the conclusion that any programmer that would
prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a
programmer that I really *would* prefer to [move on], so
that he doesn't come and [disturb] any project I'm involved
with. (...)

[T]wo years down the road you notice that some
abstraction wasn't very efficient, but now all your code
depends on all the nice object models around it, and you
cannot fix it without rewriting your app.«

http://lwn.net/Articles/249460/

»As you can see, C++ is really complex, and so a few
mistakes crept in. First of all, exceptions in
constructors do call local destructors, but only if the
exception is caught.«

http://www.fefe.de/c++/

»C++ is just an abomination. Everything is wrong with it
in every way. So I really tried to avoid using that as
much as I could and do everything in C at Netscape.«

Jamie Zawinski

http://gigamonkeys.com/blog/2009/10/16/coders-c++.html

»Though I was not the world's leading C++ expert, I was
a sophisticated and knowledgeable C++ user.

So what happened? Basically I got sick of every single
aspect of C++ being designed around higher performance
instead of my productivity. I also got sick of
impossible to diagnose linker errors and never being
able to just download a library and use it. Each new
library meant I had to build from source because C++ has
no ABI that allows compiled code to just be used. (...)

I wish the C++ people would wake up and realize that C++
is drowning in its own complexity. If I had to write a
high performance application these days I would reach
for C. Any other application I would write in either a
scripting or VM based language and then code the slow
parts in C. Why not C++? Mainly because you can't get
scripting or VM based languages to play nicely with C++
because C++ has no ABI.«

Pro-Phi-Psi; Tuesday, March 11, 2008

http://prophipsi.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-i-no-longer-like-or-use-c.html (gone)

See also:

http://www.sysprog.net/quotec.html
http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/pcinfo/progdocs/cppcrit/
http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/defective.html
http://www.nothings.org/computer/cpp.html
http://www.horstmann.com/cpp/pitfalls.html
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel
http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/Invention_of_Cplusplus.shtml
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/lkml/#s15-3
http://www.purl.org/stefan_ram/pub/c++_lernsprache_de (my own page, in German)

 

[jamm]

»C++ is too complicated. At the moment, it's impossible
for me to write portable code that I believe would work
on lots of different systems«

Donald E. Knuth

That was definitely true in 1993. I don't think its true now.

»there are a lot of people programming it. But what you
do is you force people to subset it.«

Jamie Zawinski

This is completely true, but I don't think its a show stopper. C with
C++ containers is actually a damn good language.

[snip : summary "Many smart people do not like C++"]

That's fine. Many smart people don't like jazz, or rugby union either.
I'll live with that, although I don't think any of them will overrule my
own experience. Similarly, many smart people do like Turkish Delight,
butternut squash and Manchester United. I don't know why, or even how,
but I'll get over it.

Isn't it OOP that we should really be blaming? I believe/hope that OOP is an
evolutionary dead end and that we will come up with something better in the
future.

I mostly use C++ as a 'pimped out' C. In some projects I have gone full
blown C++ and utilized polymorphism, templates, multiple inheritance, etc..
It can get compilcated but I also see it as more powerful then other OOP
languages.

 

[Nobody]

Isn't it OOP that we should really be blaming?

I think that OOP is a reasonable enough concept. It isn't a silver bullet,
but nothing ever is.

IMHO, C++'s faults can be squarely blamed upon trying to extend C from
a low-level systems language into a high-level applications language
*without letting go of any of C's low-level features*.

Without getting into the actual merits of Java, the idea of producing a
"C++ lite" which sacrificed some of the capability and performance in
favour of simplicity was an eminently sensible idea.

 

[Ian Collins]

I think that OOP is a reasonable enough concept. It isn't a silver bullet,
but nothing ever is.

IMHO, C++'s faults can be squarely blamed upon trying to extend C from
a low-level systems language into a high-level applications language
*without letting go of any of C's low-level features*.

Without getting into the actual merits of Java, the idea of producing a
"C++ lite" which sacrificed some of the capability and performance in
favour of simplicity was an eminently sensible idea.

Until they started adding some of the complexities back in!

 

[bartc]

Until they started adding some of the complexities back in!

I thought I'd give Java a try once. I downloaded 28MB' worth of zips (as 20
x 1.44MB files; this might have been with zmodem, and probably at
14.4Kbaud).

After unscrambling that lot, I found I couldn't do anything without the
documentation. But that was another 20MB to download. I decided to give it a
miss...

 

[James]

"Stefan Ram" <[email protected]> ha scritto nel messaggio

i don't like much german programmers (-Herbert if he is german)
you have wrong, C++ is a great language

What's wrong with German programmers?